Google’s video-sharing property YouTube now sees 4 billion video views per day. That’s a 25% increase over the past eight months, the company told Reuters in a report released this morning. There’s now approximately 60 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, compared with roughly 48 hours uploaded in May.
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YouTube may be best known for its viral sensations, lawn gnomes, and feline shenanigans, but the site’s massive collection of content has given rise to plenty of more benevolent — and, some might say important — trends.
Like helping non-profits including charity:water harness the power of video to connect to millions of viewers. And serving up lectures from major universities, opening the doors of learning to remote villages hundreds of miles away from the nearest school. In short, YouTube has done a lot of good so far. And it’s hoping to do a lot more.
Hunter Walk, a long-time Director of Product Management at Google who has steered YouTube’s product side for years, recently decided that he wanted to spearhead YouTube’s social good efforts. Granted, the role he wanted didn’t exactly exist yet, but he managed to convince YouTube chief Salar Kamangar to let him create it.
Walks’s new, self-appointed mission: Bake ‘good’ into any part of YouTube he can. → Read More
The move to bring original programming to the web continues to heat up this week, with today’s announcement of Reuters TV, a new YouTube channel featuring ten new commentary and analysis shows from the news and media division of Thomson Reuters.
The new channel joins nearly 100 other media partners on YouTube who are delivering original content, including a few big names like eHow, Motor Trend, Pitchfork TV, TED, The Onion, WSJ, WWE and more. → Read More
Say what you will about YouTube’s affinity for cats or their audience’s collective inability to write insightful comments, but there’s one thing that YouTube really just doesn’t get enough credit for: saving the music video. As MTV losts its original love in favor of Nick Cannon Presents: Whacky Garbage Nonsense and re-runs of America’s Next Quickly Forgotten Reality Show Person, music videos went without a proper home for nearly a decade. Then came YouTube.
The only bad part about watching music videos on YouTube? Everything else on YouTube. The soul-crushing comments; the gawdy artist backgrounds; the endless recommendations. That’s where Tubalr comes in. It’s YouTube’s glorious music video collection, minus all of that darn YouTube. → Read More
Bored? Yeah, me too. Which is why I just killed nearly 30 minutes doing mindless web surfing on Facebook, Reddit and Amazon. But it looks like YouTube would like a little of my holiday downtime clicks – and yours, too. The company just blogged about YouTube Slam, a game that involves pairing up two videos and voting for your favorites.
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This winter is looking to be a mild one (it’s something like 60 degrees here in New Jersey), but no worries: YouTube is bringing the snow to you, even if Mother Nature won’t.
All of YouTube’s videos are now outfitted with a special snow button, which as you may expect, turns the video into a winter wonderland. → Read More
YouTube is launching what the company calls the biggest redesign in its history today, including sweeping changes to its homepage and channel pages. The goal is better personalized video discovery and viewing, with a notable emphasis on social features. Think of the changes as the latest example of Google’s campaign to create a unified social layer for all of its products.
The new homepage looks a lot like Facebook, or Google+ for that matter. An activity feed view dominates the middle of the page, while a left-hand navigation bar provides a set of filters for what you see in the feed. The default Subscriptions feed appears to include algorithmically determined video content based on information like what videos you’ve watched and which channels you’ve subscribed to, although YouTube group product manager Noam Lovinsky wouldn’t tell me exactly how it worked. The previous version of the homepage feed, which launched early this year, wasn’t algorithmically tuned to the same degree. → Read More
YouTube has upgraded its viewer demographics and video tracking tools and changed the name from Insight to Analytics. The changes should be rolling out to “everyone with a modern browser” today, though you can still access Insight if you want to do a little comparison of capabilities.
The changes are non-destructive; some existing features have been tweaked and expanded, and there are a few new tools that could help the struggling YouTube-jockey pull in more views and better understand their viewers. → Read More
The U.S. comScore Video Metrix stats are out now for October, revealing that 184 million U.S. Internet users watched online videos last month, with an average of 21.1 hours per viewers. The total U.S. audience viewed 42.6 billion videos, an all-time high, says the measurement firm. Meanwhile, “Google sites,” led by YouTube, retained its number one ranking. However, in October, Facebook staged a comeback by moving up into the number two slot from its previous position of fifth place.
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Pro Tip: If your new business plan entails buying a bunch of domains that are clearly just one letter off from that of a major brand, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Such is the case for one gent from Illinois, who snatched up not one, not two, but six domains meant to look nearly identical to YouTube.com, filling them dubious surveys. As you’d expect, Google has now moved to seize the domains. → Read More
Walt Disney Studios and YouTube have struck deal which will bring hundreds of Disney movies to YouTube, starting today. The new partnership between the two companies includes movies from Disney, Disney-Pixar and DreamWorks Studios. The films, some of which have already arrived on YouTube, are available to rent starting at $1.99.
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YouTube has become the go-to source for video distribution and hosting, and, to date, the video giant has seen tens of millions of channels created, where users are uploading their video content in droves — by the second. Professional videographers, amateur smartphone camera operators, and everyone in between is taking advantage of the YouTube limelight, many of them through their channels. Of course, while these channels are a great place to store one’s cache of video, maybe you want to create your own independent video site to host your own videos — to take advantage of all those video optimization assets you can’t get from YouTube. → Read More
Google is shipping more Google+ features today designed to increase user engagement and sharing. These include a YouTube slider that lets you watch and share YouTube videos with your Google+ friends and two new Google Chrome extensions for sharing webpages and tracking your Google+ notifications. → Read More
In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing today, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen reminisced about selling his company to Google. “Was there any way you could not have sold?” Sarah Lacy asked? Hindsight is 20/20 Chen replied.
Chen revealed that the entire $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition was completed in one week’s time. Chen met with executives from both Google and Yahoo, including Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, at a Denny’s in Palo Alto, “We didn’t want to meet at offices, so we were like, ‘Where’s a place that none of us would go?’”
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I love finding services that bring value to small businesses. Viewbix falls squarely into that category.
ViewBix comes from the founders of Qoof, who gave agencies and advertisers a way to easily create interactive videos. The need for customization, however, tended to bring a lot of friction to the selling process.
For SMBs, it was pretty much completely out of scope. This was frustrating for Qoof’s founders, who were noticing growing demand in that vertical. → Read More
We already know that YouTube is seeing 3 billion videos viewed per day day, but now the online video giant is now seeing a whopping 800 million people per month visiting the site, Google revealed in its third-quarter earnings report last week. And today, YouTube is also announcing the ability to sell merchandise, tickets and more via the site.
Through a feature called the Merch Store, YouTube partners will be able to sell artist merchandise, digital downloads, concert tickets and other experiences to fans and visitors. YouTube has partnered with a number of companies to launch these stores. Topspin is helping power merchandise sales, concert tickets and experiences; SongKick will help sell tickets for concerts; and iTunes and Amazon will power transactions for music downloads. → Read More
Google’s YouTube debuted an experimental music discovery project dubbed YouTube Disco last year in January, enabling users to create quick-and-dirty playlists and discover new artists and music videos on the fly.
Not that this is a really big deal or anything, but a reader informs us that the feature, which was launched rather quietly via YouTube test lab TestTube, recently stopped returning results even for queries like ‘Lady Gaga’, ‘Justin Bieber’ and ‘Madonna’. No more Finding, Mixing or Watching, folks. → Read More
When I was just a wee pupil, an excellent science fair project didn’t get you much. At best, you walked away with a blue ribbon and the satisfaction of knowing your paper mache volcano was better than your friends’. These days, a great science project can win you much more, like the opportunity to attend a rocket launch in Japan. Way cooler, yes?
Thanks to a partnership between Lenovo and YouTube, students from all over the globe will be able to submit an explanation of their experiments through YouTube for a chance to have those experiments conducted in space. The project is called Space Lab and it officially kicks off today. → Read More
YouTube today delivered its movie rental service to UK customers, making it the third country to gain access to the service. Both Canada and the U.S. have enjoyed YouTube movie rentals for a while now. At this point there’s plenty to choose from, with over 1,000 different titles ranging from blockbusters to indie films.
Each rental will last 48 hours, and cost between £2.49 (USD $3.87) to £3.49 (USD $5.42). Users can access their rented videos from any computer as long as they’re signed in to their YouTube account, along with Google TV, any Honeycomb-powered Android tablet and select Android smartphones. → Read More
I hate 3D videos. Chances are, you hate 3D videos too. And yet, the electronics makers of the world insist on shoving 3D display technology into everything from TVs to smartphones, regardless of the fact that there’s still next to no worthwhile 3D content out there. Besides Avatar — but seriously, I could barely make it through that movie without nodding off the first time.
But wherever video trends go, Youtube will follow. YouTube has been playing around with 3D video support for some time now, with the biggest holdback being that only a very, very small chunk of the population owns a camera capable of capturing that extra dimension. Looking to get more 3D content onto their site, YouTube is today rolling out a Beta of a 2D to 3D conversion system. They also removed the 15 minute video limit for all verified users. → Read More
